Congratulations to Verena Rossa-Roccor (IRES) and Aleah Wong (IOF), winners of the 2025 Sumaila-Volvo Graduate Prize in Environmental Sustainability.
This prize is for a Master’s or Ph.D. student whose peer-reviewed publications to date are expected to have the most significant impact on the field of environmental sustainability. The endowment established by Dr. Rashid Sumaila upon being named the 2017 Volvo Environment Prize laureate.
Verena Rossa-Roccor (PhD IRES) left her career as a physician because she became too frustrated with the limited impact she had on the systemic factors that made her patients sick. She then went on to complete a Master’s degree in public health at UBC. It was there that she became increasingly interested in the concept of knowledge mobilization, that is, how can research evidence more effectively shape policy decisions? She is now working with co-supervisors David Boyd (IRES) and Paul Kershaw (School of Population and Public Health) to explore ways in which academics conduct knowledge-to-action activities in the environmental policy realm. She was nominated for “Framing climate change as a human health issue: enough to tip the scale in climate policy?” published by Lancet Planetary Health in which she argue that in order to be more effective agents of change, academics have to bid farewell to the idea of evidence-based policy making and instead embrace the complexities and value-laden realities of politics. This means that they have to build capacity as knowledge mobilizers that include strategies such as inside lobbying or movement building.
Aleah Wong (PhD, IOF) received an interdisciplinary B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This liberal arts experience initially sparked her interest in social-ecological systems, solutions-focused research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Aleah uses a trait-based approach, stakeholder surveys and interviews to study aquaculture at the nexus of food, climate and biodiversity. Broadly, she is exploring the potential of aquatic species to contribute to food, climate and biodiversity goals and examining their social-ecological synergies and trade-offs to help inform sustainable and equitable pathways for aquaculture. She was nominated for “A traits-based approach to assess aquaculture’s contributions to food, climate change, and biodiversity goals” published in Nature.
Tags: awards, biodiversity, food security, honours, IOF students, public health, Publications, Rashid Sumaila